Do LLMs Know a Good Hypothesis When They See One? Logit-Based Energy Scoring Outperforms Prompted LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Hypothesis Ranking

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can reliably assess scientific hypotheses by using a logit-based energy scoring method that leverages the model’s intrinsic confidence. Across 1,323 papers in 12 disciplines, this intrinsic scoring achieved a 33.0% Hit@1 rate, outperforming a prompted listwise ranking approach that scored 16.6%. The best result, a 1‑billion‑parameter model with logit-based energy scoring, reached 53.1% Hit@1, suggesting that confidence‑based evaluation could improve trustworthy AI‑enabled scientific discovery.

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